Lawsuits test state’s community college DEI rules
California’s new community college rules sound simple enough: As of this year, all instructors must teach in a way that is culturally inclusive and must prove during employee evaluations they respect and acknowledge students and colleagues of diverse backgrounds.
But what if an instructor holds so-called color-blind views and prefers to ignore people’s race, ethnicity, gender or other physical and cultural characteristics as a personal philosophy? Or if an instructor disagrees entirely with the “anti-racism” and “diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility lens” that state’s college officials now require?
Seven instructors from four community colleges in the Central Valley are now testing that cultural collision on constitutional grounds, saying their views could get them fired under the new rules. With the backing of national advocacy groups, the instructors are suing state and local college officials in federal court to have the regulations tossed.
The suits echo another federal lawsuit, filed in May against the University of California, in which a psychology professor hoping to work at UC Santa Cruz ran up against a UC requirement that applicants submit a statement supporting “diversity, equity and inclusion.” The applicant likened it to a “modern-day loyalty oath” of the kind discredited in the 1950s, when those who wouldn’t sign might be labeled communist subversives.
Critics in the Bay Area and elsewhere have also seized on the dispute. For example, the Wall Street Journal published a letter this month from Keith Hand, a UC Law San Francisco professor, who called such rules misguided because they “limit expression” and “alienate faculty.”
“The First Amendment protects the academic freedom right of faculty members to present and teach diverse viewpoints in the classroom, and of students to be exposed to diverse opinions,” says a suit filed Thursday by the free-speech group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression on behalf of six of the instructors. Four teach at Madera Community College three hours east of San Jose in Madera County, and two teach at Clovis and Reedley community colleges in Fresno County.
Another group, the Institute for Free Speech, filed a similar lawsuit on July 6 on behalf of Daymon Johnson, a history instructor at Bakersfield College in Kern County.
“Almost everything Professor Johnson teaches violates the new DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility) requirements — not just by failing to advance the DEIA and anti-racist ideologies, but also by criticizing them,” the suit says, noting that compliance with the new rules would violate the instructor’s conscience and force him to surrender his academic freedom.
In his U.S. History class this fall, for example, Johnson plans to have students read two books claiming to debunk the historian Howard Zinn’s work, which reveals less flattering versions of the American story, and the well-known 1619 Project, which digs deeply into the foundations of slavery.
His lawsuit contains a long list of things that the instructor “does not wish” to do. These include referring to transgender students by their preferred pronouns, acknowledging that social identities are diverse, and demonstrating “DEI and anti-racism practices” because he “rejects and even finds (them) abhorrent.”
Johnson is also a leader of the Renegade Institute for Liberty, a Bakersfield College group that opposes “political and ideological tyranny.” Its acronym is RIFL.
The suit claims that Johnson is already in the crosshairs of the college administration for his views and quotes a Kern college district trustee saying, in reference to employees holding antiDEIA views: “They’re in that 5% that we have to continue to cull. Got them in my livestock operation and that’s why we put a rope on some of them and take them to the slaughterhouse.”
The Kern trustees did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The suit says that Bakersfield College already fired another instructor, who was Johnson’s predecessor at RIFL, and calls him “the first cullee.”
According to the suit, the person who oversaw the firing was the Kern district’s former chancellor, Sonya Christian, who has just become the chancellor of the California community colleges. With 116 schools and more than 2 million students enrolling each year, it’s the nation’s largest higher education system.
On Friday afternoon, state Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office filed a response to Johnson’s suit on behalf of Christian, arguing the instructor has not only failed to show he’s been harmed by the rules, but because of that, he also lacks standing to complain about them.
The response defends the diversity regulations and says the rules “do not restrict the free speech of any employee,” nor do they infringe on anyone’s academic freedom, “including Johnson’s.”
The system’s Board of Governors has the right to establish policies that “reflect its ideals and principles regarding diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility,” the state argues.
A spokesperson for Christian said the college system has not yet responded in court to the more recent lawsuit and would not comment on it.
The new regulations require all 73 college districts to develop policies for evaluating employee performance and tenure eligibility in light of their “DEIA competencies.”
The rules follow a series of other DEIA guidance and messages from the chancellor’s office in recent years, and say to ensure academic success, “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) and anti-racism remain at the heart of our work.”
The college system also posts a glossary of DEIA terms, which defines color blindness as a “racial ideology” that ignores “a large part of one’s identity and lived experience” and therefore “perpetuates existing racial inequities.”
Bill Blanken, a chemistry instructor at Reedley College, is one of the six instructors who sued the state Thursday. The suit says he worries his required selfevaluation won’t pass muster because “he believes that everyone must be treated equally and in a color-blind manner regardless of race, rather than adopting and promoting the race-conscious equity and ‘anti-racism.’” Michael Stannard, a plaintiff who teaches philosophy at Clovis College, says in the suit he worries about the evaluation “because he will criticize ‘equity,’ ‘intersectionality’ and ‘anti-racism.’” (The college system defines “intersectionality” as the fact that people who share a group identity are nevertheless individuals, and may also identify with other groups so that “sweeping generalizations” don’t apply.)
The other four instructors who sued, all from Madera College, outlined similar concerns. They are Loren Palsgaard, English; James Druley, philosophy; David Richardson, history; and Linda de Morales, chemistry.